With turbinado sprinkled on top, these are kind of like a sugar cookie sandwich with a filling of your favorite dried fruit, such as prunes, apricots, cherries, dates, cranberries or even dried ginger. Medrich recommends a combo of ginger and cranberries for the winter holidays. I used some especially plump, dried black currants, which I toted back from Quebec last year.

You can flavor the dough with your choice of grated lemon zest or ground cinnamon or anise. I found that fragrant Meyer lemon zest was a beautiful compliment to the sweet-tart, almost blueberry-like flavor of the currants.

Roll the dough out into two rectangles, sprinkle dried fruit on each of them, and then fold the dough over to seal before cutting into squares. I found that I couldn’t roll out the dough into rectangles as large as Medrich specified in the directions without them getting too thin. As a result, I didn’t quite end up with 32 cookies as she notes in her recipe.

Which might be just as well, because these cookies have such great texture and flavor that I wanted to eat each and every one.

It doesn’t get more old-school than that.

Pebbly Beach Fruit Squares

(Makes 24 to 32 two-and-a-half-inch squares)

Alice Medrich writes that if your dried fruit is especially hard or chewy, it will only get harder after baking. To avoid this, soak pieces in a small bowl with just enough cold water (or fruit juices or wine) to cover for 20 minutes (longer will dilute and oversoften the fruit). Drain and pat pieces very dry before using.

Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and mix together thoroughly with a whisk or fork.

With a large spoon in a medium mixing bowl or with a mixer, beat butter with the granulated sugar until smooth and well blended but not fluffy. Add egg, vanilla, and lemon zest and beat until smooth. Add flour mixture and mix until completely incorporated.

Divide the dough in half and form each into a rectangle. Wrap the patties in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Position racks in the upper and lower thirds of oven.

Remove dough from the refrigerator and let sit for 15 minutes to soften slightly. On a sheet of parchment paper or plastic wrap, roll one piece of dough into a rectangle 81/2 inches by 16 1/2 inches. With a short side facing you, scatter half of the dried fruit on the bottom half of the dough. Fold top half of the dough over fruit, using the paper as a handle. Peel paper from the top of dough. (If it sticks, chill dough for a few minutes until the paper peels easily.) Dust top of dough lightly with half of the coarse sugar and pat lightly to make sure the sugar adheres. Use a heavy knife to trim the edges. Cut into 4 strips and then cut each strip into 4 pieces to make 16 squares. Place cookies 2 inches apart on lined or greased cookie sheets. Repeat with remaining dough, fruit, and sugar.

Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until edges are lightly browned. Rotate pans from top to bottom and from front to back halfway through the baking time to ensure even baking. For lined pans, set the pans or just the liners on racks to cool; for unlined pans, use a metal spatula to transfer cookies to racks. Cool cookies completely before stacking or storing. May be kept in an airtight container for a week.

Hoo boy — another “keeper” from Carolyn (Cookie Monster) Jung! Say, do you happen to have any tips on effectively rolling out a good rectangle? I don’t usually have too much trouble getting a rolled-out circle when needed, but the rectangle thing often eludes me. I remember seeing a suggestion someplace about rolling dough inside a pre-formed something or other, but the memory of that tip is now dim to non-existent. These do look good, Carolyn — am putting it into my “must try” folder 🙂

Carolyn, ok we need to check our DNA. We are so freaky similar. I have an old skool paper calender too (this years has pictures of Canadian scenery on it). Hubby keeps trying to get me to make use of the phone and iPad calender but I am resisting! 😛

What’s great about this recipe is it uses dried fruit, so it’s year round! Looks lovely and buttery!
I’m sort of in the middle of old/new school. I like my calendar on paper, not smart phone. But, I love my Kindle. It’s super for traveling.

Carroll: I once watched a Japanese soba maker use a technique to roll out noodle dough in which he first formed a circle, but through subsequent rolling on a board and with the dough wrapped around the rolling pin somehow made it emerge into a perfect square. Now, I don’t have such mad skills. But forming dough into a pretty good facsimile of a rectangle just takes a little practice. Always roll from the center on out. That helps immensely and keeps the depth of the dough more even.

Yum!! I bought this book pretty quickly after it became available in stores and have made some delicious things out of it! I don’t know how I missed this one! But I’m excited to try it. Alice Medrich truly is a master baker. I’ll never forget the day I met her at a chocolate festival in Napa several years ago. I think I felt how some people felt when they shook hands with Paul McCartney in the ’60s. 🙂

I was able to get 32 cookies out of this recipe, but it required rolling the dough very thinly between two pieces of parchment paper. The dough ended up being so thin that I could see the pattern on my table through it. As handling such thin dough was extremely difficult, I lined my baking sheet with aluminum foil, sprayed it with oil, and baked the cookies as a single, full baking sheet sized cookie. It took 23 minutes. I cut it directly after taking it out of the oven then let it cool on a rack. They were very easy to cut and came out great. They taste amazing. I’m really excited to make them again, maybe with dates instead of black currants. Any suggestions on other flavor combinations besides black currants-lemon and cranberry-ginger?

J: Aren’t they wonderful? The dough is not the easiest to handle. But as you noted, you are well rewarded in the end. As for other combinations, I bet dried apricots would be wonderful, maybe with orange zest? And what about dried apples and cinnamon around fall? Oooh, and I wonder if dried papaya and dried pineapple might be fun with perhaps coconut shards?